(Trinidad Express) Five thousand acres across the country will be used for rice cultivation during the next six months.
Food Production Minister Vasant Bharath said yesterday at the commissioning of the Two Brothers Large Farm at Warrenville that this endeavour will take the country’s rice production capacity to 20 per cent of local needs, with the aim being 40 per cent over the next 12-18 months.
Bharath said that there was a pressing need for the country to be self-sufficient and increase food security, and so his ministry would be providing incentives for farmers, including, for the first time ever, a guaranteed price of $2.99 per kilogramme of rice seed.
There will also be incentives for the purchase of machinery (up to $200,000) and environmentally friendly fertiliser ($3,000), which will help take dangerous chemicals out of the system, “improving the quality of food that we eat”, he said.
The Two Brothers Corporation is a Guyanese rice farming organisation that opened in 1976.
Its presence in Trinidad is part of the Commercial Large Farms Programme (CLFP) programme.
This programme aims to have 15 farms that will achieve an increase in domestic agricultural output through local and foreign entrepreneurship, employing state of the art food production technologies on leased State lands.
There are currently three farms up and running: Tucker Valley Farm Project, the PCS Nitrogen Model Farm and Edinburgh Farm.
Adewale Luke, chief financial officer of Two Brothers Corporation, said that planting will start as soon as possible, but construction is awaiting Town and Country approval. “Right now we are levelling the land for planting. It will probably take two weeks to a month to complete levelling then we will start cultivation,” he said.
The first harvest, provided there are no hiccups, should be at the end of January 2012, and the expected output of the farm will be 300 tonnes per annum.
